Paula Panich
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Overview
Los Angeles, California 90004Paula Panich writes about plants, gardens, landscape, travel, books, and food for the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Gastronomica and other publications.
w: Read "At Play in L.A." my blog about plants, art,
literature & gardens
e: view email paula@paulapanich.com
Description
PAULA PANICH, a journalist, teacher, writer and speaker, has been writing about plants, gardens, food and travel for three decades.
She is currently an instructor in the UCLA Ext. Landscape Architecture Program in Los Angeles, where she teaches about narrative and the intersections between landscape architecture and literature, landscapem, and art.
She holds a master of fine arts degree in creative writing from Warren Wilson College and teaches at the New York Botanical Garden, the Berkshire Botanical Garden, and at the Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens (San Marino, California), among other horticultural venues, and at Boston University.
Her work has appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Gastronomica, Better Homes and Gardens, and other publications.
She is coauthor with Nora Burba Trulsson of The Desert Southwest and Desert Southwest Gardens (Bantam Books) and was editor of DiRT: A Garden Journal from the Connecticut River Valley .
She divides her gardening and life between USDA Zones 5 (Northampton, Massachusetts) and 9 (Los Angeles). She thinks she has the best job in the world.
Paula Panich has taught writing courses at:
More about Paula:
I am not a scholar but sometimes scholarly; not a poet but a writer of (sometimes, when I’m lucky) lyrical prose; I write about gardens, shelter, landscape, food, art, and about people whose lives required me to crawl inside their work to take long, gulping, greedy breaths: Chekhov, M.F.K. Fisher, Edith Wharton, John Cage, Robert Irwin, Mary Austin. God only knows which poor soul is next.
I've had the privilege of teaching amazing people who have taught me far more than I could ever teach in them in writing classes at the New York Botanical Garden, the New England Wildflower Society, the Institute for Ecosystem Studies, Boston University, the Getty Center, the Huntington, the Los Angeles County Arboretum, and about a dozen leafy places and horticultural societies in between.
My work has been published in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post; and in Gastronomica and the Harvard Review and in many places you've never heard of. I've written four books, the most recent of which is a deservedly unpublished novel set in 1932 Hollywood.
Topics
Paula Panich’s Speaking Topics (partial list)
All talks are illustrated and are one hour long, although time can be expanded at will – or contracted, but the latter not by much.
Ever Changing/Never Less Than Whole: Perception and Robert Irwin’s Garden at the Getty Center in Los Angeles
Writer Paula Panich visited contemporary artist Robert Irwin’s garden one morning a week for six months for a particular reason: She wanted to test the artist’s ideas about seeing and perceiving. The result? She agrees with him. Perception is an activity and can be enhanced in the human being. She will show some of the hundreds of photographs of this ever changing garden, and urge you to push your own capabilities about how and what you see.
The Shape of Your Heart, the Shape of Your Garden: Spatial Archetypes and the Reflection of Culture
The late architect and Pratt professor Mimi Lobell (1942-2001) held that humankind has danced with six basic shapes that lie behind the forms of human expression --- art, architecture, garden-making, music, literature, and so forth. Which shapes attract you? And how are they reflected in your house and garden? This talk also plays with ideas found in Werner Herzog’s documentary film, Cave of the Forgotten Dreams.
Tales of Passion, Obsession, and Other First Hand Reports From the Garden
Do you think garden writing is mostly about rattling teacups among the delphiniums? Think again. You know in your heart the garden is all about passion and obsession. Spend an enlightening evening with Paula Panich as she unearths written tales of sex, lying, cheating, greed, and other first hand reports from the garden. Hear the voices of witty and world-weary writers (ever think of Chekhov’s garden outside that cherry orchard?) who know it’s not all about the Garden of Eden.
The Landscape of Sorrow and Love: M.F.K. Fisher in Hemet, California
The great food writer and prose stylist, M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992) and her second husband, artist Dillwyn Parrish, moved to Hemet from Switzerland in 1940 to escape war and to cope with Parrish’s fatal disease. This is their story, and the story of the Southern California landscape of its time. (The landscapes of the Hemet Valley and the San Jacinto Mountains are of particular interest to Paula Panich, as she has lived part-time in Idyllwild for five years.)
(Suggestion: serving tea or lunch using M.F.K. Fisher’s recipes. Speaker can advise.)
M.F.K. Fisher and Her Home Ground: Living and Loving in the Landscape of California
M.F.K. Fisher (1908-1992), the great prose stylist and food writer, began her California odyssey as a three-year-old in Whittier in the teens and twenties; she returned to California to Hemet during the war years; spent vacations in Laguna Beach; lived in Napa for fifteen years; and spent her final years on a ranch in Sonoma. Hers is a California story of abundance and struggle. (Suggestion: serving tea or lunch using M.F.K. Fisher’s recipes. Speaker can advise.)
Writer Mary Hunter Austin and her Land of Little Rain: The Beloved Landscape of the Owens River Valley
The exquisite writer Mary Hunter (1868-1934) came to California at age 20, in 1888. The beautiful landscape she saw moved her to write her first piece of prose. A few years later, living in the Owens River Valley, the now-experienced and more confident Mary Austin wrote her masterpiece, The Land of Little Rain (1903), about which Edward Abbey wrote: [This book] is about earth, sky, weather, and some of the plants and animals that survive and reproduce among those elemental and elementary events, and about a few of the human beings who once lived in what now seems to us, from our urbanized point of view, like something close to an original state of nature.”
Nothing like it had been written before --- a hymn to the American desert. Austin was the original writer of the beauty and ecology of California’s dry natural world. This talk introduces Austin, the beautiful landscape of the Owens River Valley, and the price it paid so that Los Angeles could become the megalopolis it is.
There Really Was a Cherry Orchard: Anton Chekhov and His Passion for Gardens and Landscape
Anton Chekhov’s (1860-1904) letters, plays, and stories reveal him to be one of the world’s most passionate gardeners and lovers of landscape. Her pursued his gardens at his final house in Yalta, near the very end of his far-too-short life. This talk is a celebration of one of the world’s most compassionate and humane writers. (Suggest Russian tea and pastries to be served.)
Please contact Paula Panich for speaking fee: paula.panich@gmail.com
She will provide photographs of subjects for publicity.
Locations
Los Angeles, Boston, New York - open to travel coast-to-coast
Photo Gallery
Audience Reviews
Smell the Peaches
Lydia Plunk from Diamond Bar, CA - 10/11/2010 23:39:57
Paula Panich is simply the best writing teacher. Ever. A working writer: whenever my writing gets flat, I pull out her book or get to one of her talks.
Creative, erudite, and delightful
Scott Calhoun from Tucson, Arizona - 10/08/2010 12:23:27
Paula Panich has a rare gift for connecting the dots between the literary, art, and plant worlds. Borrowing one of her own phrases, Paula's talks go beyond "rattling teacups among the delphiniums". If you're curious about the lives, loves, and gardens of literary figures from Jack London to Anton Chekhov, Paula Panich is your girl. Paula also teaches inspired classes on garden writing.
